Forthcoming Windows 8 Dev Stuff

Ars Technica graced the web today with an extremely well-written article about forthcoming stuff for development on Windows 8 :

 

I saw Windows 8 on the internet, and man is it UUG-LY (in my opinion anyhow- others might really like it). Plus, it looks so different from the other Widows operating system formats, and seems a bit harder to figure out. I guess we'll just have to see how it develops!

 

Well, Window 8 has not been released yet, so what you've seen were either hoaxes or screen shots of early versions. One article from yesterday I've seen said it's in alpha, that means that a lot can still change until final release. It looks very much like Windows 7 so far.

But I don't like Windows much anyway ... as a developer, I've had to deal with Microsoft's escapades for 20 years, and I'm simply fed up with it.

I'm not surprised at all that Windows 8 will contain yet another couple of new ways to program it (DirectUI, for instance). This means developers will have to learn yet another new library.

Microsoft has been neglecting such things as basic utility for the user (for instance, from Vista on it was impossible to simply hear an audio source that is plugged into the computer, no you have to have some specialty software for that b/c of the then-new CoreAudio library; plus, from Windows 7 it was impossible to redefine keyboard shortcuts) and the developer (MMSystem was scrapped in Vista, and CoreAudio introduced; GDI was emulated was emulated on Vista, GDI+ slow, and Windows 7 introduced Direct2D), and hence I try to avoid it whenever I can.

Microsoft is following the path of Apple to make their OS a pile of junk that looks pretty, but is neither convenient for the user nor for the developer who has to write all the software crap that people are going to use.

What I'm extremely pissed about is that Microsoft Developer Network dropped the user-friendly help browser that worked well for a long time, in favor of a bizarrely buggy and unusable web interface that contains a lot of broken links and hard-to-find information. This means I won't ever develop a single program for Windows again, b/c I can't be bothered to use their new help browser. Perhaps when it's mature in 5-10 years. Platform SDK was a pain to install before, but now it's an effed-up mess.

I've come to appreciate Linux as a development platform. Linux is not only free of charge and open (everyone can contribute to it), but it contains a thousand times more functionality than Windows ever had, in all versions combined. Just look at Fedora, Ubuntu or Debian ... they look nice, and they're UNIX ... and they're extremely powerful. Plus, they're community-developed, so they're independent.

 

I'm still on vista at home, I have 7 at work and I just don't get to worked up over the MS updates.
both vista and 7 work for me so meh..

I would like to play with the new version, but the only way I'll have it on my computer at home is if I buy a brand new machine and it's loaded already

 

Heise.de has an interesting article about the topic (Google-translated)

They also seem to have an image of Windows 8:



The caption reads "The UI of Windows 8 is optimized for gestures and is based on the tiles known from Windows Phone 7. (Fig. 1)"